In the past manipulation, threading and circulation of casing or tubulars was done with a variety of tools such as fill up and circulation tools that featured a seal to the inside or the outside of the tubular to be able to pump fluid as the tubular string was lowered into the borehole or to initially fill that last segment that was added to the string before running in. Typically, the handling of a joint to be added to a string was done with large and heavy casing elevators. Such tools are illustrated in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,578,632, 5,971,079; 7,028,769; 7,665,515 and 6,173,777.
More recently systems have been developed that employ the top drive for rotation and axial movement of a tubular joint to be made up to an existing string and advanced into the borehole. These are rather complex devices that rely on cam pairs to convert rotation to axial movement of slips that cams the slips radially outwardly or inwardly to grip the inside or the outside of a tubular. They feature opposed cam pairs to allow slip actuation with bi-directional rotation and a lock position in between to allow for release. These designs are highly complex and expensive to produce and present complications that could require significant downtime for maintenance. The design is illustrated in U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,424,939 and 7,909,120.
These systems are very complex, heavy and have not been found to solve all the problems associated with making up and running a casing string and are not needed when there is not a need to rotate the casing while running, for example, where the casing strings are run in the vertical portion of the wellbore. It has also been found that using tongs to make up the casing joints as they are being run is much faster than using any of the methods referenced above.
Some of the same problems exist when running any tubular string such as drill pipe. In these cases, the makeup and break out the connections are done by special tongs, but the drill pipe or other tubular must be connected to the mud system through the top drive or mud hose. This connection is currently done by threadedly connecting the tubular to the top drive. This process does take more than 10 minutes when done on a deep water floating vessel in rough sea conditions.
When running casing many are not using the fill-up tools to fill or circulate fluid while running. It is now common to use the older method of handling a mud hose at the rig floor, inserting the end of the hose in the casing by hand and opening a valve to fill the casing. As before, this method is time-consuming and can be dangerous. There remains a need to handle the casing, fill and circulate that is not complex, heavy or dangerous. There is also a need for an improved method of filling, circulating or taking flow back while tripping drill pipe.
Other devices to assist in attaching to a tubular and cementing a well bore are illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 4,246,967 Harris, U.S. Pat. No. 5,152,554 LaFleur, U.S. Pat. No. 5,348,351 LaFleur and U.S. Pat. No. 5,413,171 Womack. None of these devices teach lifting, manipulating or supporting the string of tubular while connected, they simply teach a method of quickly connecting to a tubular.
Grapples for borehole use are discussed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,127,297, 2,410,262; 2,184,681 and 7,578,348.